Today, the Pope addressed – in English – a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
There is one final reflection that the subject of your Assembly can suggest to us today. As some of the papers presented in the last few days have emphasized, the scientific method itself, in its gathering of data and in the processing and use of those data in projections, has inherent limitations that necessarily restrict scientific predictability to specific contexts and approaches. Science cannot, therefore, presume to provide a complete, deterministic representation of our future and of the development of every phenomenon that it studies. Philosophy and theology might make an important contribution to this fundamentally epistemological question by, for example, helping the empirical sciences to recognize a difference between the mathematical inability to predict certain events and the validity of the principle of causality, or between scientific indeterminism or contingency (randomness) and causality on the philosophical level, or, more radically, between evolution as the origin of a succession in space and time, and creation as the ultimate origin of participated being in essential Being.
At the same time, there is a higher level that necessarily transcends all scientific predictions, namely, the human world of freedom and history. Whereas the physical cosmos can have its own spatial-temporal development, only humanity, strictly speaking, has a history, the history of its freedom. Freedom, like reason, is a precious part of God’s image within us, and it can never be reduced to a deterministic analysis. Its transcendence vis-à-vis the material world must be acknowledged and respected, since it is a sign of our human dignity. Denying that transcendence in the name of a supposed absolute ability of the scientific method to predict and condition the human world would involve the loss of what is human in man, and, by failing to recognize his uniqueness and transcendence, could dangerously open the door to his exploitation.
In 2003, the paper recalls, in an interview, then-Cardinal Ratzinger said:
"In August I started to write a book on Jesus. As things stand, it will take me probably 3 or 4 years to do it. In it, I would like to show how a living, harmonious and consistent Being steps out of the pages of the Bible, and how the Jesus of the Bible is also very much present and contemporary."
Sixteen months later, he became Pope. But apparently, even as Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger has found time to work on the book, because he recently told the head of the Vatican publishing house that only the bibliography is not complete.
"When it is done, I will call you," he told a delegation from the publishing house headed by Mons. Antonio Scotti.
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